Her comments came in the aftermath of the killing of three students and three school employees at Nashville’s Covenant school by a 28-year-old female assailant. She was reportedly armed with multiple firearms when she carried out the horrific attack.
A five-member police team entered the building in response to the shooting and heard shots fired on the second floor. Two officers opened fire in response and killed the suspect. One officer suffered a hand injury from broken glass.
Jean-Pierre’s Monday press conference referenced the gun control package passed last summer but called for yet more measures to be enacted.
The press secretary asked, “How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and pass the ‘assault weapons’ ban, to close loopholes in our background check system, or to require the safe storage of guns?”
She insisted that Washington needs “to do something.”
And therein lies the problem. The rush to do “something” typically involves poorly thought-out solutions that do nothing to address the problem of violent criminals.
The president addressed the attack at a White House event for small business owners. He called the mass shooting “sick” and “heartbreaking” and said that more must be done to rein in gun violence. “It’s ripping our communities apart…ripping at the very soul of the nation, and we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons.”
It was widely reported Monday that the private Christian school did not have armed resources officers on campus from the Nashville Police Department during the attack.
That was the same situation at Denver’s East High School last Wednesday when a 17-year-old student shot two faculty members. Since the shooting and another in February, the superintendent announced that there will be two armed resource officers on campus for the rest of the year and possibly beyond.
Biden renewed his call for Congress to prohibit so-called “assault weapons” in a way similar to the ban he was part of implementing in 1994. That led to a decade-long ban on the manufacture, sale, or possession of what were called “semiautomatic assault weapons.” It also prohibited “large capacity ammunition feeding devices.”
That ban, which did not demonstrably affect violent crime rates, was allowed to expire in 2004.
The president on Monday also addressed the mental health of the survivors.
He compared their suffering to soldiers returning to the U.S. from Iraq. “So many members of the military came back with post-traumatic stress after witnessing the violence and participating in it,” Biden told the audience. “Well, these children, these teachers…we should be focusing on their mental health as well.”
Law enforcement officials report the shooter carried two “assault-style” rifles and a pistol in the attack. The Associated Press reports that it is believed that two of them were obtained legally in the Nashville area.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake did not give reporters a motive but said authorities have a manifesto from the shooter. “We have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”
Police confirmed that she was once a student at the school, which teaches from kindergarten through sixth grade. The three children who perished were eight or nine years old.
